Towards An Abolitionist Horizon: A Guidebook for Young Organizers

Designed by Mon M

“I have learned to accept the fact that we risk disappointment, disillusionment, even despair, every time we act. Every time we decide to believe the world can be better. Every time we decide to trust others to be as noble as we think they are. And that there might be years during which our grief is equal to, or even greater than, our hope. The alternative, however, not to act, and therefore to miss experiencing other people at their best, reaching toward their fullness, has never appealed to me.”

- Alice Walker

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Table of Contents Section 1: Foundational Concepts

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Section 2: Questions and Tools to Sharpen Abolitionist Organizing

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Section 3: Quotes to Inspire Abolitionist Organizing

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Section 5: Abolitionist Poetry

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Section 6: Resources

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Art by Micah Bazant

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Art by Sarah Ross

Section 4: Prompts / Activities

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Introduction from Mariame I’m going to keep this short. Last year (2020), I hoped to create a short guidebook for participants in Project NIA’s Janine Soleil Abolitionist Youth Organizing Institute (“AYO NYC!”). Unfortunately when the pandemic hit, my plans were derailed and I was unable to create a resource that participants could use after the institute to continue to develop their abolitionist visions and politics. We, Project NIA, decided to offer our Abolitionist Youth Organizing Institute for a second summer in 2021. So I’m making good on my original plan by co-creating this guidebook for this summer’s institute participants.

The guidebook is based on my ideas about what might have been useful and helpful to me as a young organizer developing my abolitionist consciousness. I hope that you find it useful and that you will write all over it as you sharpen your questions and ideas. While this is a beautiful document designed by Mon, it’s intended to be a GUIDEBOOK which means that it’s for use rather than display. I love hearing about whether resources that I co-create are helpful to people, so please feel free to email niapoetry@gmail.com to share your feedback.

If you’re accessing this online, you can click the “Source” links directly. If you have the printed version, a link to the online version is available with a QR code & in the yellow box below.

In Peace and Solidarity, Mariame Kaba Founder and Director, Project NIA (June 2021)

Scan this with your phone camera or click the link!

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You can find this workbook online at https://issuu. com/projectnia/ docs/janine_ soleil_workbook_ final-2.

Section 1: Foundational Concepts Read these definitions and write your own using the words that feel most appropriate to you. How would you explain these terms to your friends and family? Find your own words.

ableism What is ableism?

“A system that places value on people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normality, intelligence, excellence, desirability, and productivity. These constructed ideas are deeply rooted in anti-Blackness, eugenics, misogyny, colonialism, imperialism and capitalism. This form of systemic oppression leads to people and society determining who is valuable and worthy based on a person’s language, appearance, religion and/ Art by Blake Wadley or their ability to satisfactorily [re]produce, excel and ‘behave.’ You do not have to be disabled to experience ableism.”

A working definition by Talila “TL” Lewis; updated January 2021 developed in community *with Disabled Black and other negatively racialized people, especially Dustin Gibson.*

accountability What is accountability?

Accountability is a PROCESS. Taking accountability has to be an active practice.

As scholar-activist Ann Russo suggests: “Accountability is a practice, not an end, and it is a continuous process, rather than an individual act. It is a practice of awareness about how our ideas, organizations, policies, and activism are often embedded in the logics and structures of power.”

Connie Burk of the Northwest Network in Seattle, Washington, frames accountability as “an internal resource for recognizing and redressing the harms we have caused to ourselves and others” rather than as “something that happens to bad people.” Similarly, Carolyn Boyes-Watson, in her book Peacemaking

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Circles and Urban Youth, suggests we understand accountability as “an active experience, not a passive one” in that “[i]t is something we do, not something done to us.”

Accountability means being responsible to yourself and those around you for your choices and the consequences of your choices. Accountability is not a character trait, it is an active process that people choose to engage in, voluntarily and continuously.

belonging What is belonging? “...a feeling of deep relatedness and acceptance; a feeling of ‘I would rather be here than anywhere else. Belonging is the opposite of loneliness. It’s a feeling of home, of ‘I can exhale here and be fully myself with no judgement.’

Belonging is about shared values and responsibility, and the desire to participate in making your community better. It’s about taking pride, showing up, and offering your unique gifts to others. You can’t belong if you only take.”

- Source: Radha Agarwal

Food for Thought What gives you a feeling of belonging, or who?

When are times when you have felt like you belonged, or were part of a community? How did this community form?

Read Source: Community Organizing and Prison Abolition from the Empty Cages Collective

community What is community?

A group of three or more people with whom you share similar values and interests and where you experience a sense of belonging.

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capitalism What is capitalism?

“At its core, capitalism was defined by Marx as a social relation of production.

He meant that profits are not the result of good accounting or the inventive ideas of the superrich, but are instead the outcome of an exploitative relationship between two classes of people: bosses and workers. In our society, employers and workers meet each other on a very unequal playing field, in which one owns the means to produce value, and the other has no choice but to sell their labor in order to live. No matter how ‘essential’ we discover workers to be, the bosses are the ones that make sometimes life-ordeath decisions at workplaces, and, at the end of the day, take home the profits.

Capitalism is therefore a system in which production and exchange are determined by these positions of exploitation. This social order of haves and have-nots is neither natural nor timeless.”

Source: A People’s Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics

Glossary Capital: Money that is used to accumulate more money. Capital’s power of self-expansion derives from a social relation in which workers are compelled to labor and produce value for the capitalists.”

Capitalist class: A class of people made up of those who control the means of production, have political power, dictate the terms of other’s working conditions, or own capital that can be invested in production.”

Means of production: Tools and materials necessary for production (e.g. factories, office buildings, land, machinery, IT infrastructure, and so on).”

Working class: A class of people made up of anyone that must sell their labor in order to work and has no access to the means of production themselves.”

Read More Racial Capitalism and Abolition Zine

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healing justice What is healing justice?

Healing Justice, according to healer and organizer Cara Page, is a framework that identifies how we can holistically respond to and intervene in generational trauma and violence and bring collective practices that can impact and transform the consequences of oppression on our bodies, hearts and minds. Through this framework we continue to build political and philosophical convergences of healing inside of liberation movements and organizations.

Healing Justice Definitions with contributions

by Kindred Collective, Prentis Hemphill, Erica Woodland and Adaku Utah Source: Working Definitions by Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective.

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Values and Frameworks That Deeply Inform and Shape the Origins of Healing Justice

by Kindred Collective

imperialism What is imperialism?

Imperialism is the extension of one nation & power and influence over other nations, peoples, or lands for the purpose of maintaining control.

Source: Dissenters

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intersectionality What is intersectionality?

Read this short and cogent explanation by Dr. Jacqui Shine “The idea that multiple oppressions reinforce each other to create new categories of suffering.”

– Keeanga Yamahatta Taylor

liberation What is liberation?

“Liberation is the practice of love. It is developing a sense of self that we can love, and learning to love others with their differences from us. Liberation is finding balance in our individual lives and in the agendas of our coalitions. Balance keeps us upright and oriented, moving toward our goals. Liberation is the development of competence, the ability to make something happen consistent with a goal. It is taking charge of our own destiny and creating the world we want to live in, together with all the others we need to survive. Liberation is the belief that we can succeed, a sense of confidence in ourselves and in our collective efforts. Liberation is joy at our collective efficacy and at surviving in a world that sometimes tries to kill us.

Liberation is the knowledge that we are not alone. It is mutual support, encouragement, and trust that others will be there if we fall, and that we need to be there for others.

Liberation is commitment to the effort of critical transformation, to the people in our community, to the goal of equity and justice, and to love. Liberation is passion and compassion, those strong and motivating feelings that we must live by our hearts as well as our minds. Liberation is based in something far bigger than me as an individual, or us as a coalition, or our organization as a community, or any one nation, or any particular world. It’s about that force that connects us all to one another as living beings, that force that is defined differently by every spiritual belief system but which binds us by the vision that there can be a better world and we can help to create it.”

- Bobbie Harro, 1995. Source: Cycles of Liberation.

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militarism What is militarism?

Militarism is a strategy of using violence (or threats of violence) in order to keep people in positions of power in control and keep the racial, economic, and other social hierarchies that give them their power in place. Militarism is the use of violence and coercion to control people and resources. Militarized US forces and institutions include police, prisons, ICE, and the military.

Militarism works to create and enforce borders. Borders are violent. Over the past few decades, the United States’ Southern border region has become increasingly militarized. Military strategies, culture, technologies, hardware, and combat veterans work to policing the borderlands. After the Vietnam War in the 1970s, the U.S. brought military electronic surveillance technology back home to the Southern border. Since then, and especially after 9/11, border militarization has intensified.

In the past two decades, the budget for immigration and border enforcement has multiplied more than 11 times, to $24.2 billion by 2019. The ballooning budget helps the agencies acquire more military-grade equipment.

The border wall is a place where policing, militarism, surveillance, incarceration, and legacies of war collide. This is some key history on the border wall and its militarization.

In 1945, the first part of the border wall was built near Calexico, California with recycled parts from Crystal City, a Japanese internment camp. After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in WWII, the US government detained 120,000 Japanese Americans in these camps. So you see the direct connection of how these different parts of this country’s history come together and the vicious cycle.

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Art by No One Is Illegal

Source: Dissenters

mutual aid What is mutual aid?

“Mutual aid is a term to describe people giving each other needed material support, trying to resist the control dynamics, hierarchies and system-affirming, oppressive arrangements of charity and social services.

Mutual aid projects are a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions, not just through symbolic acts or putting pressure on their representatives in government, but by actually building new social relations that are more survivable.”

- Dean Spade. Source: Big Door

Brigade.

policing What is policing?

“Policing is a social relationship made up of a set of practices that are empowered by the state to enforce law and social control through the use of force. Reinforcing the oppressive social and economic relationships that have been central to the US throughout its history, the roots of policing in the United States are closely linked the capture of people escaping slavery, and the enforcement of Black Codes. Similarly, police forces have been used to keep new immigrants ‘in line’ and to prevent the poor and working classes from making demands.

As social conditions change, how policing is used to target poor people, people of color, immigrants, and others who do not conform on the street or in their homes also shifts.

The choices policing requires about which people to target, what to target them for, and when to arrest and book them play a major role in who ultimately gets imprisoned.”

- Critical Resistance

“Police are the muscle of racial capitalism.”

– Alyxandra Goodwin

(Action Center on Race and the Economy, ACRE)

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political education What is political education?

“To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is due to them too, that there is no such thing as a demiurge, that there is no famous man who will take the responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people.”

- Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

prison industrial complex abolition

Art by Molly Crabapple

What is PIC abolition?

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“Abolition is not absence, it is presence. What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities. So those who feel in their gut deep anxiety that abolition means knock it all down, scorch the earth and start something new, let that go. Abolition is building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.”

- Ruth Wilson Gilmore

What is PIC abolition? (cont)

Art by Rachel Kuo

“Prison industrial complex (PIC) abolition is a political vision, a structural analysis of oppression, and a practical organizing strategy. While some people might think of abolition as primarily a negative project — ‘Let’s tear everything down tomorrow and hope for the best’ — PIC abolition is a vision of a restructured society in a world where we have everything we need: food, shelter, education, health, art, beauty, clean water, and more. Things that are foundational to our personal and community safety.” -

- Mariame Kaba Source: “So You’re Thinking of Becoming An Abolitionist”.

punishment What is punishment? “a gratifying process of enacting revenge that also perpetuates cycles of violence...”

- Kai Cheng Thom

safety What is safety? “the ability to bring, be, and move through the world as your full self.” –

- API Chaya

social justice What is social justice?

A process not an outcome, which seeks fair (re)distribution of resources, opportunities, and responsibilities; challenges the roots of oppression and injustice; empowers all people to exercise self-determination and realize their full potential, and builds social solidarity and community capacity for collaborative action.

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transformative justice What is transformative justice?

We are trying to build alternatives to our current systems and break generational cycles of violence within our communities and families. We do not believe that prisons or cops make us safer. We believe that we can create the things we need. Transformative justice (TJ) is one way that we are trying to address violence, harm and abuse in our communities in ways that are generative and do not create more destruction and trauma.

Transformative justice processes are not perfect, and we are still learning a lot.

“TJ is not simply the absence of the state and violence, but the presence of the values, practices, relationships and world that we want. It is not only identifying what we don’t want, but proactively practicing and putting in place things we want, such as healthy relationships, good communication skills, skills to de-escalate active or ‘live’ harm and violence in the moment, learning how to express our anger in ways that are not destructive, incorporating healing into our everyday lives.”

- Mia Mingus

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“Transformative justice is a framework to prevent, intervene in, and address harm through non-punitive accountability. It’s helpful to think of transformative justice as a wider framework or approach and community accountability as more of a strategy.

The community accountability model itself cannot be applied as a universal alternative because it must be voluntary.

Transformative justice is not a happily ever after and it’s not an alternative to prison. It’s a framework that prioritizes relationship building, developing our skills, and uprooting various oppressions. It seeks to address violence without using violence.

We are working on transformative justice now, currently. It’s not something we are waiting to take on in a nebulous or utopic future. TJ exists as its own framework for preventing, intervening in and transforming harm.

It’s needed today and will always be needed.” - Mariame Kaba

Section 2: Questions and Tools to Sharpen Abolitionist Organizing One of the most important skills to develop as a PIC abolitionist is how to formulate good questions rather than to come up with THE right answer. The way to improve in creating good questions is to practice and to sharpen our thinking. This section offers some tools for discernment and for assessment.

What are some guiding questions for an organizer?

“To fulfill her task of building organizations and a broader movement, the conscious organizer must be guided in her work by her answers to basic questions: What’s the nature of the system? What are the current conditions within this system? And what are the forces that have the interest and the capability to make change?”

Art by MPD150

- Towards Land, Work, & Power by Jaron Browne

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When you are presented with an issue, it’s good to begin by seeking to understand. This resource from Panche Be Ink is a useful tool to get you started.

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Abolitionist Steps to End Policing Organizing demands should never be rooted in more money for police: training, body cams, community policing. The story of policing is a story about capitalism and about all the kinds of labor needed to sustain it. The violence work of police and policing is part of that labor. Capitalism, empire, and white supremacy were historically produced and are maintained by the violent work of police and policing.

Some key questions when assessing if reforms enhance freedom or enhance policing:

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Does it increase $ to police?

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Does it reduce scale of police?

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Does it de-link police from ideas of safety?

- Harsha Walia

Art by MPD_150

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challenge the notion that police increase safety?

reduce tools / tactics / technology police have at their disposal?

Equipping police officers with body cameras will require more money going toward police budgets.

Body cameras are pitched as making police more accountable, increasing the idea that policing, done "right," makes people safe.

Body cameras provide the police with another tool, increasing surveillance and increasing police budgets to acquire more gadgets.

COMMUNITY POLICING

Advocates of community policing argue that departments will have to hire more cops to be in neighborhoods and in the community.

This is based on the belief that policing is focused on keeping people safe, and the violence of policing is caused by a "breakdown of trust" with the community.

MORE TRAINING

More training will require more funding and resources going to police to develop and run trainings.

This furthers the belief that better training would ensure that we can rely on police for safety, and that instances of police harm and violence occur because of lack of training.

all of these.

This will increase the scope of policing, given the type of training. For instance, some advocate for police to be trained on how to respond to mental health crises, furthering the idea that police are the go to for every kind of problem.

In some cases, there would be an increase in funding, whereas in other cases, there would be no change.

Overseeing the police through a board presumes that cases of excessive force, killing, lying, planting false information, etc. are exceptional occurrences rather than part of the daily violence of policing.

Some argue for Civilian Review Boards "with teeth," the power to make decisions and take away policing tools and tactics.

However, a board with that level of power has never existed despite 50+ years of organizing for them.

This further entrenches policing as a legitimate, reformable system, with a "community" mandate. Some boards, tasked with overseeing them, become structurally invested in their existence.

BODY CAMERAS

CIVILIAN REVIEW / OVERSIGHT BOARDS

"JAIL KILLER COPS": PROSECUTE POLICE WHO HAVE KILLED AND ABUSED CIVILIANS.

DOES THIS...

Prosecuting police does not lead to changes in funding or resourcing police.

Individualizing police violence creates a false distinction between "good police" (who keep us safe), and "bad police" (who are unusual cases), rather than challenging the assumption that policing creates safety or examining policing as systemic violence.

reduce funding to police?

challenge the notion that police increase safety?

reduce the scale of policing?

Body cameras are based on the idea that police who do not use "excessive force" are less threatening. But police can turn off body cameras and, when used, footage often doesn't have the impact that community members want, or is used for surveillance.

More community police means that the scale of policing will increase, particularly in Black, Brown, poor neighborhoods, where there is perceived "mistrust."

Cops are trained in additional tactics and approaches.

Often, media attention in high profile cases leads to more resources and technology, including body cameras and "training."

This reinforces the prison industrial complex by portraying killer/ corrupt cops as 'bad apples" rather than part of a regular system of violence, and reinforces the idea that prosecution and prison serve real justice.

reduce tools / tactics / technology police have at their disposal?

reduce the scale of policing?

The less financial support for police undergoing investigation for killing and excessive use of force, the less support for policing.

SUSPEND THE USE OF PAID ADMINISTRATIVE LEAVE FOR COPS UNDER INVESTIGATION

This can INCREASE community-based budgets as municipalities no longer pay for policing's harm against community members.

It challenges the notion that policing violence, and the administrative costs it incurs, are essential risks of creating "safety."

Access to paid administrative leave lessens the consequences of use of force, and presumes the right of police to use violence at all.

WITHHOLD PENSIONS AND DON'T REHIRE COPS INVOLVED IN EXCESSIVE FORCE

This can INCREASE community-based budgets as municipalities no longer pay for policing's harm against community members.

It challenges the notion that killings and excessive force are exceptions, rather than the rule.

It reduces the ability of police forces to move around or re-engage cops known for their use of violence.

CAP OVERTIME ACCRUAL + OT PAY FOR MILITARY EXERCISES

This can INCREASE community-based budgets since we won't have to pay for cops learning how to better make war on our communities.

It challenges the notion that we need police to be trained for "counterterrorism" and other military-style action and surveillance in the guise of increasing "safety."

Weapons trainings and expos are used to scale up policing infrastructure and shape goals for future tools, tactics, technology.

This stops police from increasing their legitimacy, capacity, and skills as "the blue line" in order to expand their reach over our daily lives and community spaces.

WITHDRAW PARTICIPATION IN POLICE MILITARIZATION PROGRAMS

This can INCREASE community-based budgets since we won't have to pay for cops learning how to better make war on our communities.

It challenges the notion that we need police to be trained for "counterterrorism" and other military-style action and surveillance in the guise of increasing "safety."

Weapons trainings and expos are used to scale up policing infrastructure and shape goals for future tools, tactics, technology.

This stops police from increasing their legitimacy, capacity, and skills as "the blue line" in order to expand their reach over our daily lives and community spaces.

If we decrease funding for policing, this will decrease its resources.

Prioritizing funding resources also creates space to imagine, learn about, and make resources that actually create well-being.

If we decrease funding for policing, this will decrease the expansion of tools and technology.

PRIORITIZE SPENDING ON COMMUNITY HEALTH, EDUCATION, AFFORDABLE HOUSING

REDUCE THE SIZE OF THE POLICE FORCE

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reduce funding to police?

If we decrease funding for policing, this will decrease the size, scope and capacity of systems of policing.

Posters courtesy of Critical Resistance

DOES THIS...

CRITICAL RESISTANCE * 510.444.0484 * criticalresistance.org

Reformist reforms vs. abolitionist steps in policing

These charts break down the difference between reformist reforms which continue or expand the reach of policing, and abolitionist steps that work to chip away and reduce its overall impact. As we struggle to decrease the power of policing there are also positive and pro-active investments we can make in community health and well-being.

Reformist reforms vs. abolitionist steps to end IMPRISONMENT DOES THIS...

Building jails or prisons to address overcrowding or rising numbers of “new” prisoners (for example, migrants)

reduce the number of people imprisoned, under surveillance, or under other forms of state control?

This poster is a tool to assess and understand differences between reforms that strengthen imprisonment and abolitionist steps that reduce its overall impact and grow other possibilities for wellbeing. As we work to dismantle incarceration in all its forms, we must resist common reforms that create or expand cages anywhere, including under the guise of “addressing needs” or as “updated” replacements. Jails and prisons deprive communities of resources like medical and mental health care, transportation, food, and housing. In our fights, it is critical to uplift and strategically contribute to movements led by imprisoned people, both to address pressing conditions and for abolition. In all decarceration strategies, we must utilize tactics that will improve life for those most affected and make space to build the worlds we need. create resources and infrastructures that are steady, preventative, and accessible without police and prison guard contact?

reduce the reach of jails, prisons, and surveillance in our everyday lives?

strengthen capacities to prevent or address harm and create processes for community accountability?

NO. If they build it, they will fill it! Building more jails and prisons creates more cages, period!

NO. Building more jails and prisons increases the reach of the PIC and prison and jail infrastructures. Creating more cages means building something we have to tear down later.

Building “closer to home,” or as “nicer”, “modern,” “rehabilitative” alternatives to existing jails or prisons

NO. The history of the prison is a history of reform. New jails and prisons that are proposed as improvements on existing sites or buildings expand the arguments for and lengthen the life of imprisonment.

NO. There is no such thing as a “humane” cage. Construction under the pretense of addressing the harms that imprisonment reinforces the logics of using cages as a solution for social, economic, and political issues.

Building jails / prisons that focus on “providing services” to address the needs of specific “populations”

NO. Life-affirming resources cannot be provided in spaces of imprisonment. These “services” do not decrease numbers of imprisoned people - they keep specific populations of people imprisoned.

NO. Building jails and prisons that lock up specific populations expands the reach of imprisonment by normalizing the idea that care can and should be coupled with policing and imprisonment.

NO. The argument for these jails and prisons is that they provide specialized services through policing, imprisonment, and control.

Environments of control and violence cannot provide care.

NO. Prisons and jails do not enable accountability.

They are sites that perpetuate violence and harm, and solidify oppressive social expectations around gender, sexuality, and mental health.

NO. By doubling-down on the “need” for some people to be locked up, these efforts strengthen and expand the reach of prisons, jails, and the PIC.

NO. Manufacturing divisions between imprisoned people, as more or less "dangerous," limits our ability to create real supports and resources that sustain all people.

NO These efforts reinscribe the idea that some people are “risks” to society and others “deserve another chance,” strengthening logics of punishment without engaging the context of how harms happen.

NO. Monitoring brings the prison, jail, or detention center into a person’s home, turning it into a space of incarceration, which takes both a psychological and a financial toll.

NO. E-carceration means that regular daily movements are constantly linked to threats of arrest.

This does not allow people to build and maintain community.

NO. E-carceration extends the violence and harm of imprisonment into people’s homes and everyday lives.

Nothing about electronic monitoring creates systems of accountability or healing.

NO. These services move people from one locked facility into another facility often with similar rules and with the threat of jail or prison looming.

NO. This expands the reach of imprisonment, by adding to the larger system. This is particularly the case where the partnerships replicate and expand logics and rules of jails and prisons, as opposed to intentionally challenging them.

NO. These programs require moving through the policing and court systems to access any services that might be available there.

NO. Court mandated / police-run “justice” processes hold similar threats for participants as the broader PIC. They do not necessarily include meaningful processes for creating accountability or tools for preventing future harm.

reduce the number of people imprisoned, under surveillance, or under other forms of state control?

reduce the reach of jails, prisons, and surveillance in our everyday lives?

Legislative and other efforts to single out some conviction categories as “exceptions” Use of electronic monitoring (home-arrest) and other law enforcement-led “alternatives” to jails and prisons.

Public / private “partnerships” to contract services that replicate conditions of imprisonment

DOES THIS...

NO. This strategy entrenches the idea that anybody “deserves” or “needs” to be locked up. Prioritizing only some people for release justifies expansion.

NO. Electronic monitoring is a form of state control. It escalates the frequency of contact with the PIC for all members of a household, increasing the vulnerability of people already subject to policing and surveillance.

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NO. Adding cages takes away state and local funding and resources that could be directed to community-led infrastructures.

NO. Building more prisons and jails entrenches the carceral logic of accountability. They are sites that perpetuate violence and harm.

NO. Arguments for jails “closer to home” reinforce the idea that jails and police create “safety” and take away the capacity to build resources that can create well-being.

NO. Prisons and jails do not enable accountability. They are sites that perpetuate violence and harm.

create resources and infrastructures that are steady, preventative, and accessible without police and prison guard contact?

strengthen capacities to prevent or address harm and create processes for community accountability?

Decarceration takes people out of prisons and jails, and out of direct state control, with the aim of supporting people to stay outside.

By de-prioritizing and de-legitimizing jails, prisons, and related systems we reduce the common-sense idea that they are necessary and/or “effective”.

As part of abolitionist organizing we must focus on getting people out while building strong infrastructures of support.

When we work to diminish carceral logic, we can pair our work toward decarceration with other ways of responding to and preventing harm. Investing in one will grow our capacities for the other.

By reducing the number of cages, we can reduce the number of people inside.

When we close a jail or prison and do not replace it with other carceral systems, we chip away at the idea that cages address social, political, and economic problems.

when we organize for it.

When we fight to close jails and prisons we can open the way to defund imprisonment and invest in infrastructures locally that support and sustain people. Abolition is also a BUILDING strategy.

Our work to close prisons and jails and keep them closed is one step toward shifting the focus to addressing and preventing harm without violence and putting resources into that work.

Rejecting government spending for jail and prison construction, renovation, expansion

Nearly all spending projects include enhancements that support arguments for the “benefits” of incarceration.

By rejecting spending on jails and prisons, we counter the common-sense argument that they are necessary and reduce the system’s reach.

When we reject funding for jails and prisons this can create opportunities to defund imprisonment and invest in infrastructures locally that support and sustain people.

When we reject funding for jails and prisons this can create opportunities to defund imprisonment and invest in infrastructures locally that support and sustain people.

Reducing policing and police contact in general, and “quality of life” policing, specifically

Policing feeds imprisonment, and is an important part of systems of control. Reducing police contact reduces the number of people caught in the criminal legal system.

Policing is a justification for imprisonment. By reducing police contact, the legitimacy and power of jails and prisons can be reduced.

When we fight to reduce police contact and funding, we can free up state resources. We can organize allocation to community-led infrastructures that are decoupled from policing. We must eliminate all forms of policing from social and community services.

Policing does not prevent harm, but actually causes it. Fighting to reduce policing provides opportunities for communities to invest in systems that prevent harm and create accountability.

Creating voluntary, accessible, community-run services and infrastructures

Access to services that address needs people articulate for themselves can reduce vulnerability to police contact and prevent harm, while building sites for self-determination.

Voluntary services that are community-led and -informed take power away from jails and prisons by removing the focus on imprisonment as a solution to social, economic, and political issues.

When we create services and infrastructures that are de-coupled from policing and imprisonment we develop systems with the potential to engage with people’s complex needs in consistent and trust-building ways.

People getting their needs met in community- determined and -led ways prevents harm. By bolstering resources that address harm, without replicating harm, we create opportunities for community accountability, not punishment and isolation.

Decarceration or reducing the number of people in prisons and jails

Shutting down existing jails and prisons and not replacing them

Check out the Abolitionist Steps poster series: criticalresistance.org * CRITICAL RESISTANCE * 510.444.0484 v.1, 2021

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Section 3: Quotes to Inspire Abolitionist Organizing We can learn a lot from the words of others. The following quotes offer some ideas that are important to abolitionist organizing. Read them, reflect on them, and write your own words rooted in an abolitionist politic and vision.

Towards Hope Wanting an end to the dehumanizing system of oppression is hopeful work.

“SHIRIN: You’ve lived through World War II, through the Cold War, you’ve been part of the struggle against apartheid, you’ve seen that regime come and go, you’ve seen many American presidents come and go, and yet throughout all these years — you’re now in your 80s — you’ve managed to keep a sense of optimism. What gives you hope?

BRUTUS: Well, it certainly helps to be able to have a sense of humor, so you survive various catastrophes with a laugh or two. Secondly, I think we’re always winning small victories. They’re happening all the time. Here in Durban, we challenged the city council because they’ve cut off people’s water because they can’t pay. There are always grounds for at least a little cheerfulness and a little optimism. If you have a sense that there is this global struggle going on, where one is winning little victories in a number of places, then the real question in my mind should be how do we combine all these successes and develop them into a powerful force. But it certainly seems to me that the mere fact that one is occasionally winning a few victories, however small they might be, it is one way to keep going.”

Art by Lauren Tamaki

- Source: A Fond Farewell to Dennis Brutus” interviewed by Shirin Shirin.

“Hope is a function of struggle.”

- Brene Brown

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Towards Hope

If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places-and there are so many-where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

– Howard Zinn

Art by Monica Trinidad

“An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives.

Towards Imagination “No change for the good ever happens without it being imagined first, even if that change seems hopeless or impossible in the present.” - Martín Espada “We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.” - Neil Gaiman

“No one can stop us from imagining another kind of future, one that departs from the terrible cataclysm of violent conflict, of hateful divisions, poverty, and suffering. Let us begin to imagine the worlds we would like to inhabit, the long lives we will share, and the many futures in our hands.” -Susan Griffin

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Towards Agitation/Struggle/Protest “I see protest as a genuine means of encouraging someone to feel the inconsistencies, the horror, of the lives we are living. Social protest is to say that we do not have to live this way.” - Audre Lorde “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” - Frederick Douglass (1857)

Against Cynicism [Cynicism is] “not generative. It judges things as they are, but does not lift a finger to try to shift them.” - Krista Tippett “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” - Angela Davis

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“We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.”

- Archbishop Óscar Romero

Towards Mutuality “Everything is connected… no one thing can change by itself.”

– Paul Hawken

Towards Building “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world, is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” - David Graeber “A revolutionary is primarily concerned with building. Of course that requires the destruction of what already exists, but if anyone is only talking about destroying, they are not revolutionary.” - Kwamé Ture

Towards Community “There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.) I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then, and perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.” - Adrienne Rich “To be human is to belong. We are literally born in community attached to someone else.” - Radha Agrawal “To act with integrity, we must see ourselves in context, as individuals and as members of a larger community... To be a member of that community means both to be shaped by it and to have responsibility for shaping it... No one can live out the fullness of self when she or he is hungry or condemned to a life of poverty and discrimination... People cannot live fully when the color of their skin limits their freedom and opportunities, when their lives are overshadowed by the fear of war or threat of ecological disaster. To live with integrity in an unjust society we must work for justice.” - Starhawk

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Towards Change “I believe in change: change personal, and change in society. I have experienced a revolution (unfinished, without question, but one whose new order is everywhere on view) in the South. And I grew up – until I refused to go – in the Methodist church, which taught me that Paul will sometimes change on the way to Damascus, and that Moses – that beloved old man – went through so many changes he made God mad.” – Alice Walker

Towards Uncertainty “Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how… We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.” – Agnes de Mille

Towards Healing “When wounds are healed by love.

The scars are beautiful” - David Bowles

“In order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform.” - Paulo Freire

Towards Joy “Joy doesn’t betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine act of insurrection.”

- Rebecca Solnit

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Towards Healing “In order to build the movements capable of transforming our world, we have to do our best to live with one foot in the world we have not yet created. I believe unhealed trauma is the most dangerous force on earth. It’s the mechanism through which violence and cruelty and greed reproduce. Just as battered children have a higher likelihood of growing up to be battered or battering adults, oppressed people who have not had the opportunity to do the work of collective healing can end up assuming oppressor roles to others, and the pattern of feeling victimized, and believing that therefore the world owes us more than it owes other people, is particularly deadly.

One response to having felt helpless in the face of horrific abuses is getting stuck in trying to prevent what’s already happened. This can lead to militarization, to extreme nationalism, to the kind of opportunism that’s willing to win some kind of sovereignty or security for our own group at the expense of others—which of course only continues the cycle, create new groups of desperate people.”

– Aurora Levins Morales

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On Violence “I am not proposing that sexual violence and domestic violence will no longer exist.

I am proposing that we create a world where so many people are walking around with the skills and knowledge to support someone that there is no longer a need for anonymous hotlines. I am proposing that we break through the shame of survivors (a result of rape culture) and the victim-blaming ideology of all of us (also a result of rape culture) so that survivors can gain support from the people already in their lives.

I am proposing that we create a society where community members care enough to hold an abuser accountable so that a survivor does not have to flee their home. I am proposing that all of the folks that have been disappointed by systems work together to create alternative systems. I am proposing that we organize.” – Rebecca Farr

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Section 4: Prompts / Activities Here are some reflection questions to help you get present in this moment: ✴ How is my heart feeling at this moment? ✴ What is most alive for me right now? ✴ What is difficult or impossible to hold at this moment? ✴ How are my body and spirit doing?

READ The Power of Presence

by Raj Escondo as you think through these questions.

✴ What nourishment am I in need of at this moment? ✴ What is mine to do right now? ✴ What is mine to share?

Do you believe that people can change? Share your thoughts.

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✴ What transformations have you experienced or witnessed?

✴ “What we have been, or now are, we shall not be tomorrow.” - Ovid Share your thoughts about this sentence.

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Art by Josh MacPhee

✴ If you could change one thing in the world right now, what would you alter?

✴ When did you first become aware of the concept of ‘injustice?’ ✴ When did you first think ‘that’s not fair?’

✴ Who has been a touchstone/influence for you in your activism? ✴ Who has inspired you? What do you admire about them or their work?

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What does the following sentence make you think about?

Art by Daniel Fishel

“When something can’t be fixed then the question is what do we build instead?”

- Mariame Kaba

✴ What part of your activism is most challenging for you?

What keeps you going?

✴ “No one enters violence for the first time by committing it.” – Danielle Sered Share your thoughts about this idea.

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Art by Tina Orlandini, AgitArte

✴ Is calling for the prosecution, conviction and imprisonment of killer cops an abolitionist demand?

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“You can’t start a movement, but you can prepare for one.” - Vincent Harding

Art by C.D. Miles

Share your thoughts about this idea.

✴ Raise awareness or stir up change with your creativity today. How will you lend your creativity to a good cause?

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“Liberation under oppression is unthinkable by design.”

- Erica Meiners Share your thoughts about this idea.

Questions I like to ask myself when imagining a world without prisons and policing by Ruby Pinto: “What am I afraid of? Does the presence of police eliminate those fears? What do I imagine the police doing that I myself couldn’t do, with help? What kind of love and support could prevent or address the things I’m afraid of? When have I been brave when I was afraid? Who would I call to help me manage a frightening situation? What do I actually want after I’ve been harmed? How do I want to be treated after I’ve caused harm? What myths tell me I must be afraid of other humans? Have those fears actually come true in my life?

What could we nurture with the resources currently used up by prisons, police and the military? How can I help to raise children that do less harm than I do, and are better at repair? What is the difference between discomfort and harm?

What can I love and accept about myself so that I can love and accept it in others?”

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Activity: Giving Good Apologies Accountability begins with self-accountability. Accountability is not a destination or an arrival place. It’s an internal resource through which we decide to be aligned with values based on knowing right from wrong. It’s a process. Part of that process involves apologies - giving and receiving them.

Below are two resources I wanted to share to help you craft your apology. If you’re accessing this online, you can click directly. If you have the printed version, a link to the online version is available with a QR code & link in the front.

Harriet Lerner and Brené I’m Sorry: How To Apologize & Why It Matters Source.

Art by Danbee Kim

How to Give A Genuine Apology by Mia Mingus Source.

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This is your chance to tell your story, to write a letter to the person who has hurt you most, to write a poem, to tell a story you know, to explain the pain that you carry and what you need/still need from this person to heal. This is not for anyone except you.

Consider a relationship that has sustained an unhealed wound.

What concentrates your focus - how you were wronged, how you wronged another, what was left unresolved, or something else?

Do you need to receive or give an apology? Are you the one you need to forgive?

List the people you owe an apology to – write a good apology letter to one of them.

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Write yourself a letter, and then work to let go of some of the feelings you’ve surfaced. Use those feelings to make something new today.

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Activity: Aching for Abolition Read Aching For Abolition by Camoghne Felix (Source). Use her questions at the end of the essay to think through what the essay brings up. Content warnings for sexual violence. ✴✴✴✴✴ No one really asks a survivor what she wants.

When a woman is raped, it becomes an assault on the state, not the person. She could decide that she would rather not pursue charges and the state can decide to move forward anyway, without her consent. I am a survivor, and have been for most of my life. I am also a prison abolitionist, and have been for most of my life, years before I had the words to describe my intuition.

Often, those who stand against abolition speak on my behalf. They ask hackneyed, hoary questions about what we will do with the rapists and the murderers. I know that those questions are questions of fear and not of concern, that they have little to do with a desire to protect or comfort me. I want you to know why these questions enrage me.

His name was Archie*. Archie was my cousin.

Archie was the only person who mattered to me, really. He terrified me and impressed me. I wanted to be Archie, and I wanted to be seen by Archie, as Archie was, by proxy, the marketplace for my childhood desires; a turn at the Nintendo, a frozen M&M, a corner-store snack, permission to see my best friends after school. At 8, I did not know that it was rape. I didn’t know it as anything other than an extension of our everyday games of hierarchy in which, as any big brother might, he would take from me (my candies, my turns, my friends) and would refuse to honor my protests. *Name changed

I did not know that what happened in the basement bathroom in between rounds of Mario was rape, not until later, when the D.A.R.E. representatives came in to convince us not to do drugs (a rape might occur; there’s a one-in-three chance!) by describing to a class of elementary-school students how unwanted touching and penetration could be a criminal offense. That day, I learned that my cousin had been raping me, and that rape was criminal.

I learned that he was a rapist, and that I had become a statistic, one in three. I learned nothing about who I was or what I needed.

Shortly after, I was sent home from school with a bad report. “What happened?” my mother asked. “Why are you acting like this?”

I told the truth because I felt like I had to. And instantly, my mother became the mother of a survivor and the surrogate mother of a rapist.

My mother and grandmother believed me, and believing me meant calling the authorities and opening a case. It meant opening me up to the pokes and proddings of an investigation, which meant I had to tell the stories of how he violated me over and over again, which meant I had to lie on a table designed for a woman five times my size and be examined by a gynecologist who could confirm that the lacerations on the inside of my uterus had been received by force. With that evidence, the state indicted him, and after he was indicted, nothing was in my control.

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I knew what prison was. I knew that horrible, bad things happened there. That sometimes people were starved to death, or beaten to death, or sexually assaulted until they killed themselves. The thought of Archie sleeping in a jail cell because of me kept me up at night.

It was not what I wanted, and it tortured me every day.

As a child, I didn’t understand the mechanics of the system enough to understand what was happening to Archie. I didn’t know the difference between charges and conviction and arrest. I didn’t understand that my case wouldn’t lead to a conviction because the prosecutors didn’t want to put me through a trial, or that my cousin had already been arrested and held for other charges. I didn’t understand that it was those charges, which had nothing to do with me, that would lead to his incarceration. All I knew is that I was interrogated, probed, analyzed — and he was in jail.

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Art by after words project

I didn’t know what I wanted to happen to Archie. I didn’t know what I wanted because no one asked me, and there were no options, but I couldn’t shake the guilt I felt, and that guilt only contributed to the shame I felt about the entire thing. I had no solace; my “telling the truth” had made it worse. As soon as I told the truth, I believed my admission would ultimately take my cousin away from my grandmother, his sister away from her brother, and essentially kill my dead aunt’s living memory. My nightmares over the years were marked by various manifestations of prison violence that could be exacted on Archie’s

body, my healing compromised by the horror of incarceration.

To be a survivor is to be a relic of nightmares, responsible for both the romanticization and terror of sexual trauma. Sometimes a survivor is known; sometimes a survivor is not known.

Either way, here is one thing a survivor knows: that when someone says they want to protect their children, their spouse from an “unimaginable violence,” they’re gesturing at you, they’re gesturing at your body. Their fear is not of you, or of your assailant, but of someone they love having to become you. They fear their own identity being complicated by a violence they cannot understand but have been complicit in, or silent about. A violence that they have either hidden away or hidden behind.

The survivor is the ultimate victim. The survivor’s body is the site of an attempted killing, a simulated death, a death colored with the trauma of having had to live through and continuously recall a life-changing barbarity. Survivors are like zombies — and like zombies, the world projects its living haunts, its perceptions of good and bad, of safe and unsafe, on our bodies. Like the dead, we are trapped in this binary spiral, trapped in the clutches of another’s predictive, paternalistic, and performative understanding of safety.

At 28 years old, I am a political strategist working in electoral politics, surrounded by plenty circumstance and plenty pomp. Few of the solutions presented to us do what they are

sworn to do, especially the carceral ones. I have never felt shame around being a survivor, but I have always felt shame around being unable to find safety in reform. I cannot see a way to fix systems that oppress us. I want to believe that the reforms that Black political leaders have fought for are good enough to protect our communities. I want to believe, for the sake of my siblings, and my friends, that safety can be constructed and un-safety can be punished away. I want to believe in that because it’s easy, but my body contradicts that belief, and in that contradiction is the birth of another, much more complicated world where the binaries of good and bad are flattened into each other and erased. That world, I am sure now, is an abolitionist world.

Prison abolition is a theory based on the simple idea that prisons should not exist. It is the knowledge that our desires to live in a safe world are made impossible because of the existence of the carceral system. It means the end of policing, and the end of incarceration. It means funding community resources that prevent harm, and empowering systems that allow for equitable accountability. It means invalidating the police, and rejecting the very premise of the carceral system, rejecting the idea that harm is criminal, and, instead, assuming that everyone causes harm — some more than others, when not given what they need to effectively prevent their own harm. It means building a world where prisons shouldn’t exist and don’t have to exist at all.

The problem with our criminal-justice system isn’t just that it lacks a regenerative intent — it also lacks a restorative intent. It has no interest in providing healing to the victim or the person causing harm. It is not interested in understanding or mitigating individual harm but in criminalizing harm and capitalizing on the fiscal benefits of punishment. It presents as retribution for the victim, but it returns nothing to the individual. The system feeds itself, and feeds off of the existence of harm — and so, by design, it can have no vested interest in reducing it.

If we wanted to protect rape victims and serve survivors, our systems would attack harm and its causes at the root. It would center its solutions in harm reduction, in transformative justice, in restorative processes of accountability, and move away from punitive solutions that do nothing to stop assault from happening. A commitment to ending harm is a commitment to providing housing, food, employment, free education, extensive, trauma-informed mental-health care. We would choose comprehensive gun reform instead of hyperpolicing our schools and streets and places of worship. Punishment does little to deter “crime.” What would have deterred my cousin from harming me is community. What would have deterred him was to have his mother alive and not killed by drug addiction. What would have deterred him was to never have experienced his own assault as a child. What would have deterred him was stability. What would have deterred him was care.

“Children make the best theorists,” the critic Terry Eagleton writes in The Significance of Theory, “since they have not yet been educated into accepting our routine social practices as ‘natural,’ and so insist on posing to those practices the most embarrassingly general and fundamental questions, regarding them with a wondering estrangement which we adults have long forgotten. Since they do not yet grasp our social practices as inevitable, they do not see why we might not do things differently.”

As a child, I tossed and turned through sleeplessness and guilt at night. I knew then, even without the exact words to say so, that vengeance is not justice, and that systems of retribution are echo chambers that only serve systems and can never serve the individuals who experience harm. Why would we want any iteration of this system — a system built to serve the demands of capitalism and the psychologies of slavery? What is there to reform or replace?

I once taught a poetry workshop on Rikers Island to a group of young women. This was five

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years ago and the first time I’d been on the island since visiting family as a child. I left the workshop, stepped into the cold sun, and weeped at the warmth on my face. Walking away from them felt unfair, the sun on my skin felt unfair. If the state could take the sun, a thing we could not create or re-create with human power, away from us, then what couldn’t it take? I could still see their bright faces, the young women leaning toward me as I read poems to them, putting their hands out for more books, for more metaphors. All I could think was that this system had stolen from them things it could never give back to humanity, and I recognized the ache I’ve felt since childhood.

Abolition is a journey I am walking — a journey with long roads, steep staircases, and tactical steps — from defunding the police, to Mariame Kaba’s call to cut the police population by half, her call to abolish policing, to delegitimizing policing as a whole. But to get on that road at all, I had to start with the understanding that carceral justice is no justice at all. As Derecka Purnell so plainly puts it in an essay about police abolition, that misguided belief causes all kinds of social anxieties, “moral, economic, and otherwise.”

Sometimes I feel helpless in the face of those anxieties; sometimes it feels like they may win out. But when I feel unsure, I invest in that innate knowledge by turning to the thinkers who have been fighting for much longer than me, and I rely on them to affirm what I know and teach me what I don’t. I read their writings and I join their organizations and I listen. I read Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, I mute the doubters, I reject the limit to their imaginations, I read writings of the thinkers who are fighting for abolition in practice, who have been thinking and writing and talking about abolition for decades, I listen and listen and listen. I am comforted by abolition.

I am comforted by pointing my faith toward a different kind of justice that we have not

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considered.

For years, I hid from publicly announcing my belief in prison abolition because I felt like I had insufficient answers to my own questions. It wasn’t until this winter, when I gingerly asked an abolitionist friend, “What do you think replaces the criminal-justice system?” and she said, “Nothing replaces it,” that I said out loud, with my own mouth, “Nothing replaces it.” It’s not the answer that is inadequate but the question itself.

We live in a world immersed in carceral justice. In this tainted water, it can be hard to imagine a world where police aren’t the primary solution, or the salve to the nightmares of your imagination. I know your nightmares. I have seen them up close, over and over. My body and what has happened to it is your nightmare. The salve has been community. What has saved me is not the closed door of a cell but the openings presented by abolition, where justice is an experiential and ontological journey and not a retributive one. I didn’t always know that the true salve to the harm I faced was a complete reimagining of the justice system as we know it today. But could you have known your name before it was assigned to you? Could you have known the answer to the question until someone presented it to you?

All across the nation, in pockets that burst open like ripe fruit, our people are reimagining their relationship to policing. They are questioning their own complicitness, their discomfort, their fears of the unknown. They are listening to the leaders fighting for a vision that many of us are brand new to. They are submitting to the notion of being led.

They are submitting to the idea that there are choices we have not yet encountered, decisions we have not yet made, that may save and protect us.

If you want to protect the 8-year-old me, the

8-year-old you, I am asking you to listen. More than anything, I am asking you to be led. I am asking you to invest in better choices for you and me. I am asking you to invest in agency. I am asking you to resort to your childlike impulses and to pretend that nothing is the way it is because it has to be. I am asking you to reject the binary of safe and unsafe. I am asking you to realize that no one is born a criminal, that we all do harm and, thus, that we are all required to understand and be responsible for our collective accountability.

My cousin’s life was and is precious to me. The carceral system threatened to violate that core belief and made me feel responsible for that violation. It robbed me of true justice: the ability to know that my cousin was remorseful of the pain he caused me and that he was given the care and rigor he needed to never commit that harm again. When he came home, I chose to avoid family members who chose to interact with him because I didn’t know if I could trust him with my body or theirs. I couldn’t know if he would do the same thing to his nieces, or to my sisters, if they were to encounter him. All I knew is that he went to jail, where unspeakable things happened to him, and that he was “home.”

Use the questions below to think through the essay you just read.

What does justice mean to you?

What makes you feel safe?

Who in your life do you call first when you’re hurting or in trouble, and why?

Think about a time when you were vulnerable and needed help — what would help have looked like in that moment, before the harm was done?

Consider a time when harm was done — what would accountability have looked like for you?

I have no idea if my cousin is a good man, or a safe man, or a man I would want to know. I have no idea if he is doing more harm or working to reverse it. To know those things would be justice for me. Even as an 8-year-old, I knew that his incarceration would not have been justice for me. To have participated in reshaping his reality would have been justice for me. But it is a justice made inaccessible by a system that would rather punish him than restore me. The carceral system took away my agency, and failed to consider what justice would be for me outside a conviction.

If I had been given choices, perhaps I would have chosen some sort of restorative process or to punch him in the face. But I’ll never know, because none of it was up to me.

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Write your thoughts on the essay you just read here:

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Activity: A Future Without Borders and Cages Read ‘A Future Without Borders and Cages’ by Harsha Walia and reflect on the interactions between the Prison Industrial Complex and borders, immigration, and imperialism. Respond to the quedtions at the end to articulate your thoughts. ✴✴✴✴✴ “We continue to find that the prison is itself a border.”

– Angela Davis and Gina Dent While former President Donald Trump’s Trump’s overtly malicious immigration policy garnered international condemnation, violent immigration enforcement has been routine and bipartisan practice for over two centuries in the US. An entire apparatus bent on expanding detention and deportation, criminalizing migration through prosecutions, and militarizing the border means that ICE incarcerates approximately 52,500 people a day in more than 200 detention centers, and over a quarter million people are deported each year from the US. Border and immigration budgets outpace the budgets of all other federal law enforcement agencies combined.

Anti-migrant xenophobia is even more heightened in moments of crisis – whether during the war on drugs, after 9/11 and the never-ending war on terror, or during the COVID-19 pandemic. Populist appeals target “foreigners” for stealing our jobs, draining our services, ruining our environment, infecting our neighborhoods, and tainting our values. This us-versus-them rhetoric deflects responsibility from the underlying socio-economic systems producing mass inequality, impoverishment, and misery by conveniently scapegoating migrants and buttressing moral panics about “securing the border.” A term like “illegal” does not actually reflect anyone’s actual legal status; rather, it is a euphemism for racialized migrants from the so-called Third World. A politics of fear pitting immigrants against citizens, including other marginalized communities, is a ruling-class and imperialist ideology that breaks international solidarity. We must remember that our enemy arrives in a limousine and not on a boat.

The reality is that borders are permeable. Middle class and rich tourists and expats, the rich investor class, and members of the military enjoy unparalleled mobility around the world in order to vacation, conduct shady business deals, or militarily invade other countries. In the US, a cherry-picked handpicked immigrant diaspora is often held up to showcase the myth of “nation of immigrants” and American generosity, while still forming a fortress against the millions in the “deportspora” who are shut out, immobilized, and expelled.

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It also creates a system where border controls are a method of maintaining cheapened labor through undocumented or migrant work.

The threat of being reported to immigration authorities ensures that undocumented workers are hyper exploitable. Less than 1 percent of the world’s migrants and refugees come to the US, and when they do, they face armed border guards, prolonged detention, dangerous and low-wage working conditions, minimal access to social services, and the constant threat of deportation.

Perhaps what is most hypocritical about borders in our contemporary era is that colonial powers are intent on keeping migrants out, but are themselves responsible for creating mass displacement and migration. Most borders of today are a creation of colonial powers carving up territories, and are the cartographies of continued anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggle. A common slogan in the immigrant rights movement is “we are here because you are there,” pointing to a long arc of dirty colonial coups, capitalist trade agreements extracting land and labor, climate change, and enforced oppression as the primary driver of forced displacement from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean to the US. Most ironic, the migration crisis is declared a new crisis, even though for four centuries nearly eighty million Europeans became settlercolonists across the Americas and Oceania, while four million indentured laborers from Asia were scattered across the globe and the transatlantic slave trade kidnapped and enslaved fifteen million Africans. Colonialism, genocide, slavery, and indentureship are not only conveniently erased as continuities of violence in current invocations of a migration crisis, but are also the very conditions of possibility for the US’s border imperialism.

The violence of the immigration enforcement system is not an aberration.

The political purpose of tightened security and immigration measures, especially

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the constant threat of incarceration, is to demobilize racialized immigrant communities and to increase their collective vulnerability. The very categories of “migrant,” “refugee,” “immigrant,” and “undocumented” have been essential in forming the settlercolonial, slave-holding nation-state and upholding its violence. Just like the concept of criminality, illegality is a political construction. Criminality and illegality are both made through shifting definitions and policed to maintain the state’s coercive power, systemic hierarchies, capitalist profiteering, and social control. The social control and criminalization that delineates the carceral network and disappears undesirables is the entrenched belief that incarceration is a legitimate response to communities who are characterized innately as being illegals, deviants, criminals, terrorists, or threats. The US now has the shameful honor of having both the world’s highest prison incarceration rate and the world’s largest immigration incarceration system. Every day, the criminal injustice system is serving as a pipeline for immigration expulsion, and intensifying antiLatinx and anti-Black racial warfare. According to the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, 20 percent of those facing deportation on the grounds of ‘criminality’ are Black migrants.

Criminalization and illegalization are social processes that reproduce dehumanization, exclusion, and carceral thinking. We know there is nothing inherent about being a criminal, and how can human beings even be illegal?

We have to reject the divisive rhetoric of “productive” and “legal” and “good” immigrants, which results in the demonization of “criminal” and “illegal” and “undesirable” immigrants. Ruth Wilson Gilmore informs us that our political task is not to prove innocence, but “to attack the general system through which criminalization proceeds.” Police, prisons, and borders are interrelated system of exploitation and containment that operate by immobilizing

the people caught in their crosshairs. A no-borders, abolitionist future reminds us that capitalist relations, state violence, hierarchical oppressions, and imperial power can and must be dismantled together. A world without police, prisons, private property, militaries, and borders is a necessarily interconnected abolitionist horizon of freedom.

Respond to these popular anti-immigrant, pro-border phrases: How is this dehumanizing to migrants and refugees?

What sense of entitlement or privilege is this stereotype invoking?

How might you respond to this statement from a place of justice and collective liberation?

“They steal our jobs”

“They ruin our culture”

“They are different from us”

“There isn’t enough for us, why should we help them?

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Activity: Make A Mutual Aid Map Activity by Laura McTighe

Prompt 1: What is a Mutual Aid Map? And how do you make one?

To start, I want you to make a Mutual Aid Map of you and your people.

FIRST, let’s make some lists: YOU!!!

What do you need to be okay?

What do you have to give?

Who are the people in your home?

What are their names? ages? needs?

How do you communicate with each other?

What resources do you already have in place?

Who are the people you’re responsible for/to but are not in your home?

Where are they?

What are their names? ages? needs?

How do you communicate with each other?

What resources do you already have in place?

Who are the people you’re talking with regularly?

Where are they?

What are their names? ages? needs?

How do you communicate with each other?

What defines your connection?

The point of this first step is to make visible the connections that fill your life and the practices that you already have in place to support one another.

Now make a MAP of you and your people!!!

There’s no right or wrong way to do this. The map should be something that makes sense to you!

Use the space on the next page to draw!

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Your Map

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SECOND, let’s think about how we scale up: What are the principles/values that ground: YOU? The people in your home?

The people you’re responsible for/to but are not in your home?

The people you’re talking with regularly?

What issues do you anticipate coming up?

YOU? The people in your home?

The people you’re responsible for/to but are not in your home?

The people you’re talking with regularly?

How do you respond to those issues in ways that are reflective of principles/values?

YOU? The people in your home?

The people you’re responsible for/to but are not in your home?

The people you’re talking with regularly?

What can you do right now to put some of those systems in place?

YOU? The people in your home?

The people you’re responsible for/to but are not in your home?

The people you’re talking with regularly?

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Art by @bbyanarchists

The point of this second step is to ground you deeply in who you are in community with. As things get more dire, you will be confronted with tons of issues coming from all directions. That’s when you return to your principles and values. That way you can formulate plans and take action in ways that continue to reinforce the principles and values that define you and your community.

Use this page to scale up your map:

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Now add PRINCIPLES, VALUES, and ACTIONS to your map.

List out your principles and values, and then name the value-driven actions you are taking now.

THIRD, let’s think about what care we’re putting into this network, so we’re able to sustain the scale up: What’s one thing you can do every day to care for: YOU? The people in your home?

The people you’re responsible for/to but are not in your home?

The people you’re talking with regularly?

The point of this third step is to remind you to take care, most especially of yourself.

Mutual aid is about transforming our social relationships. How are you nurturing joy, safety, and sanity in these times?

Now add your concrete CARE work to your map!!!

Think about a small daily thing you can do and encourage your people to do.

Art by Pete Railand

FOURTH, revise, revise, revise!!!! This is a living document.

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Activity: Breathing on the Moon: Choose Abolition and Liberation by Naudika Williams A Game

Art by Ashley Lukashevsky

Art by Micah Bazant

Play Now!

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Activity: #GetFreeWrites Source: #GetFreeWrites: Writing Prompts on Police Brutality and Racist Violence by The Dark Noise Collective Make a list of all the systems or institutions that you feel like contribute to oppression: police, military, etc. What would the world be like without them?

What other structures could we put in place instead?

Art by Dio Cramer

Find all the prompts here.

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Art by Amber Huff

Activity: #GetFreeWrites

Read/ listen to Franny Choi’s Field Trip To the Museum of Human History.

Write your own poem below that explores a world without these institutions, or explores a world where these institutions are considered archaic.

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Section 5: Abolitionist Poetry Art is important not just because it makes us think and feel differently (which is still critical) but also because it helps to disrupt patterns and old ways of thinking. Artists have the power to ask, “Why can’t we do it this way?” “Why don’t we try this?” and “Why is that not possible?” Art is a practice of creativity and creativity is an important part of abolitionist organizing.

“Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.” - Audre Lorde V’ahavta by Aurora Levins Morales The First Week by Laura Eberly The Low Road by Marge Piercy Affirmation by Assata Affirmation by Eve Ewing Police Make the Best Poets by Guante Instructions for Avoiding Bad Weather by Alejandro Robino After Abolition by Kyle Carrero Lopez Give The Police Departments to the Grandmothers by Junauda Petrus (video)

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Contra La Policia

by Miguel James as translated by Guillermo Parra My entire Oeuvre is against the police If I write a Love poem it’s against the police And if I sing the nakedness of bodies I sing against the police And if I make this Earth a metaphor I make a metaphor against the police If I speak wildly in my poems I speak against the police And if I manage to create a poem it’s against the police I haven’t written a single word, a verse, a stanza that isn’t against the police All my prose is against the police My entire Oeuvre Including this poem My whole Oeuvre Is against the police.

Community Starhawk Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats.

Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power.

Community means strength that joins us our strength to do the work that needs to be done.

Arms to hold us when we falter.

A circle of healing. A circle of friends.

Someplace where we can be free.

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Section 6: Resources #1MillionExperiment: Community-Based Safety Strategies. Link.

3 Rules of Conflict. Link.

Abolish the Police for Breonna Taylor - Groundwork Zine Summer 2020. Link.

Abolitionist Responses to Jail Reform and Expansion - Critical Resistance. Link.

The Abolitionist Horizon: Building a World Without Police or Prisons (a zine by DSA Emerge). Link.

Acupressure for All and At-Home Care for All. Link.

Advice to New Abolitionists.

Link.

BEAM Healing and Accountability Wheel. Link.

Beyond Survival (PDF). Link.

Black Freedom Beyond Borders: Memories of Abolition Day (download a copy of the anthology). Link.

Building Your Abolitionist Toolbox: Everyday Resources for a Punishment-Free World. Link.

Circle Keeper Manual. Link.

Cosmic Possibilities: An Intergalactic Youth Guide to Abolition. Link.

Conflict Culture Assessment Worksheet by the Wildfire Project. Link.

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Janine Soleil Abolitionist Youth Organizing Institute Padlet Link.

Racial Capitalism and Prison Abolition Zine. Link.

#DefundPolice Toolkit. Link.

Resource Guide: Prisons, Policing and Punishment by Micah Herskind. Link.

Defund Police (video). Link.

Direct Action Zine. Link.

Disability Justice Resources from Project LETS. Link.

The Disruption Project. Link.

Healing and Accountability Graphic based on Ahimsa Collective knowledge created by Flynn Nicholls for Project NIA page 1 - Link, page 2 - Link.

Healing in Action: A Toolkit for Black Lives Matter Healing Justice and Direct Action. Link.

I Hope We Choose Love Workbook by Danbee Kim for Project NIA. Link.

Lessons on Interpersonal Accountability by the Wildfire Project. Link.

Mutual Aid 101 virtual workshop

by Mariame Kaba. Link.

Mutual Aid Resources. Link.

Organizing Resources. Link.

Police Abolition 101 zine. Link.

Police and Prison Abolition Resource Guide: Link.

Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) Abolition 101 - a webinar by Mariame Kaba. Link.

Relax, Relate, Release: Meditations for the Mind, Soul, Spirit, and Revolution -- includes meditations to imagine abolition. Link.

Seven Steps Toward Abolition by Critical Resistance. Link.

Surviving the Apocalypse Together: A Mutual Aid Safety & Wellness Planning Template for COVID-19 by Mad Queer Organizing Strategies -- Link.

Toward the Horizon of Abolition

by Mariame Kaba (a zine by Red Emmas) - Link.

Transform Harm - Link.

Transformative Justice Resources - list by Cory Lira.

Link.

Transformative Mutual Aid Practices (T-MAPs): a set of tools that provide space for building a personal “map” of wellness strategies, resilience practices, unique stories, and community resources. Link.

Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police by Mariame Kaba (a zine by Abolition Library Commons). Link.

“Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good.

What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts, adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take everyone on Earth to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale. [...]

There will always be times when you feel discouraged. I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it. I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate. [...]” - Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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